Human Resources committee  Actually, when Ontario introduced their Ontario child benefit, they stopped recovering the national child benefit from social assistance. They overhauled their social assistance system to take the child benefit portion out and create an Ontario child benefit. People who receive t

Human Resources committee  It's pretty small, yes.

Human Resources committee  I can answer a few of those. I can't speak to EI. It's not my area of expertise. In terms of the welfare wall, it depends on how you look at it. There is an issue of equity between low-income working people and people on social assistance, and there was a feeling in the mid-1990

Human Resources committee  Based on that definition of persistent poverty, that would be the case. There are a few ways of measuring persistent poverty. One is, for example, over six consecutive years. They all show roughly similar trends, so certainly if you have a very high income one year and zero the n

Human Resources committee  May I add one thing about the low-income gap? When we get an estimate of the aggregate low-income gap in Canada, I would exercise a bit of caution in equating that with the cost of eliminating low income in Canada. It's just an approximation of the overall distance, on average, b

Human Resources committee  In 2004 alone, the NCB reduced the low-income rate for children by 125,000 children. So we do have analysis of its impact on the low-income rate for children.

Human Resources committee  No. I think Quebec officials would be best placed to provide that type of information on their programming.

Human Resources committee  We were talking about the size of communities being 500,000 or more. That's the way the LICO is constructed. It has a standard low-income threshold no matter what the city. This is why, for example, Montreal had the same low-income threshold as Toronto when we knew that housing c

Human Resources committee  With respect to high school education, when you look at those high-risk groups, the biggest factor is attachment to the labour force. It really is dramatic. It doesn't have to be that much attachment to the labour force, but just having some attachment to the labour force puts th

Human Resources committee  Nothing comes immediately to mind in terms of putting a dollar figure on the cost of child poverty. There's been a lot of work in terms of some of the social and emotional outcomes for children living in low-income families. But we can certainly look into that. As Garnett pointe

Human Resources committee  We have some detail on the working poor. This is an issue, because it's not just low income. The working poor tend to lack the types of services that other workers are more likely to get, such as dental plans and disability insurance. So there is a compounding effect. It's not ju

Human Resources committee  I would add, and I think Garnett and Sylvie will support this, that you do see a kind of clustering on the Anglo-American-type countries' market economies. There is convergence there. The U.S. is higher, using half of median income. But you see a pretty comparable rate between Ca

Human Resources committee  We'll provide the committee with a finer breakdown of the composition of the market basket measure.

Human Resources committee  Yes, we can certainly provide you more detail, but it does include various costs of living, which would include heating. It includes shelter costs, heating, food, clothing, footwear--